spring chicken

vroom baby

Hi, ‘cers ;)

I missed you guys but good news I’m back :) Diving right in—

It’s an amazing time to be a fan of sunshine and good basketball. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about things like good, hard, playoff fouls. Blue collar mentality. Physicality. Small market teams. What it takes to be the face of the league. Is anyone overrated in the eyes of god or their mother? And so on and so forth. I wish I had it in me to be a sports blogger but I’m not super well versed on the rules of any sport besides tennis, which has some of the simplest rules of all time, out-simpled only by things like running and jumping and throwing. I also don’t like conflict with my friends who haven’t yet opened their hearts and minds to the joys of Pacer basketball. In conclusion, this is not a sports blog post!

Speaking of simple sports, though, I went to the Indy 500 for the first time the other weekend.

• I liked:

  • how fast the cars went

  • getting to bring in as much food and beer as I wanted

  • singing “Back Home Again in Indiana”

  • how roughly half of the crowd was wearing Pacers merch

  • the race newspaper, which provided some key historical context on the kinds of milk winners have requested over the years (overwhelmingly whole, with a couple of 2% enjoyers here and there)

  • the long lazy low-urgency pace of the day

  • walking by the snake pit on the way to the porta potty and hearing the DJ say “I only have three things to say. God bless America. God bless our troops. And gentlemen…start your FUCKING engines” and then there’s a heinous dubstep beat drop and flames shooting out of the top of the stage meanwhile the cars are still vrooming

• I didn’t like:

  • how many accidents there were. I was afraid someone would die and that is not the kind of spectacle I’m interested in!

I had a nice time and made the same two jokes all day to varying degrees of appreciation.

need this sweatshirt BAD

SONG OF THE SUMMER WATCH: PART ONE

As this beautiful spring turns warmer, I’m working on my summer playlist and thinking about what my own personal song of the summer will be. We’ve been freed of the chains of brat summer thank goodness. I was excited for Lorde’s album but so far the Virgin singles and album rollout have been pretty underwhelming. I personally enjoyed Solar Power. I didn’t mind that the theme was “I’m famous and from New Zealand and I love the environment.” I was eating it up! Yis girl kiwi pride don’t let the haters get you down. I was almost alone in this take, clearly, and I think the general public’s negative reaction to Solar Power had more of an effect on Lorde than it should have and now she’s trying to give people what she thinks we (the people) want but she’s wrong about what we want and also that’s not a good way to make music. I’ve been very excited about the presence of Dev Hynes on Virgin but so far it’s just him playing cello on Man of the Year. That’s cool but I was thinking his contributions would be a little more along the lines of co-writing and producing songs. Fortunately, I think he is releasing new music this summer as well, so as long as it’s not a cello album that’s something. Not that a Blood Orange cello album would be bad, quite the opposite! Cello is a gorgeous instrument.

The new Alex G single is excellent and the music video is lovely so I would recommend that without reservation. No big surprises there.

Back to Lorde (sorry)—a few days ago, Luke sent me the Billboard Hot 100 from the week that she released Pure Heroine. September 28th, 2013 in case you forgot! Let me tell you, Pure Heroine came just in time because that was not a great era for pop music. The Anna Kendrick cups song from Pitch Perfect was #18!! Macklemore had two songs in the top 30!! Sail by AWOLNATION was #22!¹ Lorde to the rescue. I was totally locked in thanks to Luke’s inclusion of Bravado on a mix CD he made for me freshman year. The Hot 100 list is a fun time capsule.

Anyway, long story short, the current frontrunner for my personal song of the summer is Cruise by Florida Georgia Line ft. Nelly.

That’s all for now :)

ILY!

Sydney

1. SAIL!